by Jean Plaidy
“Did you expect them to make me soft? Children go into Newgate innocent; they come out criminals. I went in, soft and foolish, I emerged hard, perhaps cruel. It is what life has done to me.”
“Carolan, my sweetheart…”
She turned her face to him; tears were streaming down it. She burst out fiercely, because she could not bear the tenderness that leaped into his eyes: “You know I loved him. You know what his desertion has meant. You know it has cut deeper than those irons, than all the horrors of prison. And yet you…” He put his hand on her shoulder.
“Carolan, do not look back. Look forward. You are young; you are beautiful. You were never meant to spend your life grieving for an unworthy lover.” His hand slipped down to her breast.
“You are beautiful, Carolan … my Carolan. You are vital; you are trembling now because you need me as I need you. Make no mistake, we were meant for each other!” She tried to control her trembling limbs. She longed to lie against him, to lift her face to his. There was in his eyes that which she had tried to arouse in Everard; she had tried to make a man of Everard, the saint.
“Carolan.” he said.
“Carolan! Darling, what is prison, what is transportation, what are chains? We can overcome them all.
Promise, my darling. Promise to come to me …”
Her body urged her to lift her head, to let her brilliant eyes tell him of her response to the passion in him. But she could see Everard, his young face so different from that of Marcus, so beautiful, so saintly. What had prevented Everard from coming to her? How could she know what? Suppose he came? Suppose, when she landed on the other side, he was there waiting for her! Miracles could happen. In seven years’ time she would be a free woman. She would be twenty-four. Was that so very old? She fought against the almost overwhelming power of her senses. Because Marcus appealed to her body so strongly, she must guard against her body. What had Aunt Harriet slyly hinted? She was like her mother, like her grandmother … she had that in her, that immodesty, that sensuous desire which could, while it lasted, seem so important that it could lure one into ruining one’s life just for a momentary satisfaction. There he lay beside her, this man whom she knew to be a thief; he was unkempt; he was dirty; he was a convict sentenced to transportation for life! And because of that indefinable attraction he had for her, she had been ready to give herself up to the sensuous dream of living beside him for the rest of her life, loving him, hating him, finding pleasure in him.
She said: “I love Everard. Who knows, he may come to me! I do not believe he has deserted me; doubtless his mother prevented his coming to Newgate … We must go back to Esther; whatever will she think?”
She got up, and went back to Esther.
“Was it very bad?” Esther asked.
“What?” said Carolan.
“The chain gang. What a coward you must think me! But I cannot bear to hear of it.” She appealed to Marcus.
“Do you think I am a coward?”
“I think you are a very charming young lady!”
Carolan threw him a glance of distaste. She felt safe now. He could not put his hands on her, with Esther so near.
Esther said: There was a lady looking over the barricade. I think she must be a passenger. She wore a beautiful gown; but how she scowled!”
“Do you not know,” said Carolan, ‘that we convicts are performing animals? Our ways and habits are a source of amusement and ridicule to the free.”
“She did not seem amused. Her dark eyes flashed. She seemed to me to be looking straight at you and Marcus. Her petticoat was satin; she had black hair and black eyes. She was very beautiful! She paced up and down … in this heat too, but she did not seem to notice it!”
Carolan said: “An admirer of Marcus’s, doubtless!” She laughed at him.
“Odd how, in his convict’s rags, he can exercise that appeal of his!”
“Do not be jealous, darling,” said Marcus.
“I am not the man to be impressed by a satin petticoat.”
“Oh, but Esther says she is beautiful! Do you not admire black eyes, Marcus?”
“What does it matter?” put in Esther. This is the happiest hour we have spent since coming aboard. I could almost feel I was taking the trip for pleasure!”
“You must have strange ideas of pleasure.Esther,“said Carolan.
“Oh come,” put in Marcus.
“A great poet once said “There is some soul of goodness in things evil, would men observingly distil it out.” There is truth in that, do you not think so?”
“I do,” said Esther. Then: “Look, there is the dark lady again!”
Marcus looked up and looked away quickly.
“Fie!” cried Carolan.
“How coquettish he is! As coy as any maiden!”
“Carolan, please do not tease me.” The seriousness of his eyes made her look at him sharply.
She demanded: “Why is it that there is always mystery surrounding you, Marcus?”
“Is there? I did not know it.”
“You must know it. In Grape Street, one was never sure of you. And even here, on this miserable prison ship, there must be mystery concerning you.”
“My dear Carolan, what are you saying? What mystery do you refer to?”
She was unable to reply. She stammered: “It was just… that you looked… oh, I cannot say. Secretive perhaps.”
“Look!” said Esther.
“That woman. She is talking to the sentry about us.”
The woman’s voice floated towards them, indignant and angry.
“I declare … such lack of discipline. One does not feel safe! They … so close … just as though they were ordinary people!”
“Oh, you dark-eyed beauty!” murmured Carolan.
“If I had you here I would let you see whether or not we are ordinary people. I would have that satin petticoat off your back!”
“Yes, my dear,” said Marcus.
“Newgate is a good teacher; and found you an apt enough pupil, I’ll swear!”
“And doubtless you would protect her from my violence, and tell her how becoming was her satin garment, and how you had always adored black eyes!”
“What if I do adore black eyes! I worship green ones … particularly when they flash in fury … and jealousy perhaps? Oh, Carolan, can you not see that you are my woman and I am your man? Do not stamp your foot or I shall be unable to resist putting my arms round you here and now and kissing your angry mouth and your angry eyes…”
“Hush! Esther will hear.”
She turned from him.
The woman had walked away from the sentry; his face was red.
“You dogs!” he cried.
“What the hell do you think this is? A pleasure cruise? Down to your holes before you’re clamped into irons, every one of you!”
The black-eyed woman, for reasons best known to herself, had put an abrupt end to the hours of freedom.
Down in the women’s quarters the heat was only just bearable. The convicts lay gasping in their berths, some of them reduced to semi-consciousness by the poisoned air. Half an hour ago two of their number had been taken away; they had died the day before. They did not talk of them, but in the minds of every woman and child was the thought, “Shall I be carried out like that before the journey’s end?”
They were just out from Cape Town, and the weeks they had spent there had been a trying ordeal, hardened though they were. They had been kept down below for what seemed interminable days and nights. Fighting for air. listening to the creaking of the ship’s timbers, with that foul odour of her stinking bilges in their nostrils which sickened even the most insensitive, most of them had longed for death. But now the ship had taken in her stores; sheep and fowls, pigs, goats, all sorts of livestock and fresh fruit and vegetables had been put aboard her; and now she was ready to complete the voyage. This was a matter for rejoicing, but the death of those two had sobered them strangely, had temporarily drawn them closer to each other.
Flash Ja
ne, a good deal thinner than she had been since they entered Cape Town, dark hollows under her eyes like saucers in her yellow-green face, no longer Flash just poor, sick, only half-alive Jane turned to Carolan and said with her habitual aggressiveness: “You never tell us nothing about yourself. How did a lady like you come to be here with a lot like us, eh?”
Was she spoiling for trouble? wondered Carolan. But as she looked at the poor shadow of that Flash Jane who had come aboard all those months ago, she felt an unexpected tenderness sweep over her, and for the moment it smothered that bitterness which had eaten into her. ringing all her thoughts and words.
“What do you care?” she said, but softly, gently.
Flash Jane spat neatly across the berth.
“Only wondered,” she muttered.
“Seemed a bit unnatural like … you and her…”
Carolan looked up into the blue-grey haze which always seemed to fill the crowded place; and she surprised herself by telling the woman what had led her here. She began with the visit to her father’s shop, and as she talked, silence fell all about her, and lack-lustre eyes were turned in her direction. She felt sympathy there in that sordid place. Nobody laughed, nobody jeered; many listened.
When she ended, a woman from an upper berth raised her emaciated arms and began to shriek.
“It was a nark what got me, lady! If I had him ‘ere I’d tear ‘im to pieces, that I would. Boiling in oil is too good for narks. Them’s my feelings.”
The silence was resumed. There was more in that silence than the languor produced by fetid heat, semi-starvation and sickness. Carolan realized that she was living through a strange experience. It was as though the women drew together, forgot beastliness, forgot cruelty, forgot everything but that they were fellow human beings.
“What about her?” said Flash Jane, jerking her head towards Esther.
“How’d she come?”
“Tell them, Esther,” said Carolan.
“Do you think they want to hear?”
“Go on!” growled Flash Jane, and Esther told them.
It was a simple little story, but they believed it. It made them angry and it made them sad. Some of them may have been present when Esther arrived at Newgate; they may have been among those who tore off her clothes. But if they had been, they would have forgotten. Then and now had no connection with each other.
“Life’s cruel, ain’t it!” said Flash Jane.
“I remember when I come to London. In service I was, where my Ma put me. Service! Not me, I says, and I come to London, and when I got there, there wasn’t nothing for me to do but pick pockets, and I wasn’t good at it. Then I met a girl who took me along to Mother Maybury.”
“Mother Maybury!” cried a shrill voice. It belonged to the woman whose chief amusement seemed to be to strip herself, expose her gross body and fling it about lewdly in grotesque movements meant to be a dance.
“You was at old Maybury’s, was you?”
“Twenty-five years back!” said Flash Jane with a touch of honesty.
“Twenty-five! Why, it must be twenty-eight since I last seen the old lady. How did you leave her, Flash? The old trollop! She ought to have been strung up long afore she met me!”
“Well, believe it or not, she died a rich woman. Died in a feather bed with servants to wait on her, so I heard.” said Flash Jane.
The other woman began to cry suddenly: not in the hysterical way in which Carolan had heard them sob during the last months.
but quietly and regretfully. There was something heart-rending about the shaking of that gross body.
Carolan said: “I’ve told my story: tell us yours.”
The words had an instant effect on the woman. She dried her eyes: she laughed hoarsely and pulled open the ragged garment she wore. Carolan thought she was going to start stripping for her dance, the dance which seemed to drive the others into a frenzy of sensuality, which would set them recounting their adventures in lust. If she did, these moments would be lost; harshness, cruelty, would return. Carolan fought for these moments, fought for a longer glimpse beneath the horrible veil which the cruelty of life had drawn tightly about these people.
She said: “I’m sure it’s interesting.”
The woman’s hands fell to her sides; her fingers plucked at her dress, miserably, not lewdly. She drew the dress tightly round her, and sat down heavily on her berth.
“Funny,” she said, ‘looking back.” Her voice was hushed; she was not speaking to them, but to herself.
“Funny to think that was me. But it was me. Gawd! What life does to you!” She turned to face Carolan, and she smiled.
“We all lived in the country. I loved the country. The trees … they was lovely. Never mind whether it was spring with the buds out and the birds up there -and what a row they used to make! or summer with the leaves all thick and green; in the autumn they was golden brown and we’d sweep up the leaves and burn ‘em. What a smell!” She began to cry softly.
“And in winter, all black with the mist on ‘em. I loved the country. My Gawd! I ain’t been there for nigh on thirty years. Do it still look the same? Trees don’t alter, do they? It’s people that changes, it ain’t trees.
“There was ten of us children! Me father worked in the fields. Me mother helped, but she was always having a fresh baby. I was the oldest. It was all right when we all got working. But Charley he was me little brother he was a cripple. No farmer wanted Charley. Him and me… well… I used to carry him everywhere on me back. But me father, he couldn’t bear Charley, because Charley was doing nothing for his keep; and he wanted Charley out of the way. He’d belt Charley. I was twelve and Charley was ten when we run away to London. We hadn’t never seen anything like London. It was wonderful. We thought there’d be work for us, but there wasn’t work. We slept in alleys and under arches, and we was colder and hungrier than we’d been in the country. But we was happier because there was no father to belt poor Charley. Then Charley stole a loaf of bread. We was together, and it was Charley who took it, and someone got hold of him and they took him, and I run behind, but they wouldn’t take me too. I never see Charley no more.”
Now everyone was listening, and the tears ran out of the woman’s eyes and she did not seem to know they were there.
“Well,” she went on, “I starved. I stole a bit, but no one caught me; and one day I talked to a girl a year older than me and she took me to Mother Maybury.” She began to laugh.
“Mother Maybury! She had a rosy face and a little white cap; spotless it was; And she’d sit by her big fire; and she would pat you on the head, and she would tell you not to be frightened any more you was one of her chicks. It would be “Eat this, ducky. Another helping, chicky? You’re with your old Mother Maybury, now, my poppet!” And you would eat; and you’d wonder if you’d died of cold by the river and gone to Heaven without knowing it. And then, when you had sat by her fire for a day or two with your belly as full as you could pack it, she would begin to explain to you all that you owed to Good Mother Maybury, and just how you would have to pay it back. She showed you how to tell fine ladies and gentlemen from the sort that aped them: she’d show you how to creep up behind them, swift as you like; she showed you how you went to bed with men. And if you didn’t like it, there was always the cold outside and the hunger waiting for you.
“Don’t be soft, my poppet!” Good Mother Maybury would say.
“My chickens have a rare time of it.” So I stayed, and I was with Mother Maybury nigh on three years, and if you looked after Mother Maybury she looked after you. And if you didn’t look after her, she looked after you too! It was queer how many who didn’t give up all their takings found themselves in jail. Good Mother Maybury! Kind Mother Maybury! It, was pease pudding she gave me first: I can taste it now. It smelt that good! I can see the log on her fire; it was all blue and pretty. So I thought I’d died and was in Heaven; but I was only at Good Mother Maybury’s.”
Silence fell, thick as the haze made by their b
reath. The misshapen girl who shared their berth sat up suddenly, her eyes brilliant.
“Keep still, you!” growled Flash Jane, but her voice held none of its old harshness. Do you want to tell us how you came to be here?” asked Carolan.
“It was the chimleys.” said the girl.
“What?”
The brother done ‘em. We was the eldest, him and me. The baby wasn’t old enough. I was five. Me brother was four; he done the chimleys. Me father made him.”
“What happened to your brother?” asked Carolan.
“He went down a chimley. He got burned to death. Me father came in and told us. He was wild … ‘cause, if me brother was burned to death, who was going to sweep the chimleys?”
There was a stark horror in the halting words which had been lacking in the woman’s more coherent story. Everyone was listening. The misshapen little girl was no longer a butt for their cruelty; she was a child who had suffered horrors such as even they had not experienced.
The child began to scream out: “They dressed me up in his clothes, so’s they’d think I was a boy. I’d got to go, they said. I couldn’t… I was frightened. I knew I’d be burned to death. Me brother was frightened of that, and he’d got burned to death. I knew I’d be burned to death… I couldn’t…!”
“Try not to think of it,” said Esther.
“It is past now.”
The child looked at her with wide eyes.
“He made me. I was too big. Me brother had done it when he was four. He wasn’t too big. But I was bigger. It used to hurt. Once I couldn’t get out, and I screamed and screamed. Then they got me out… and… I wouldn’t go in again. Me father beat me. Me mother beat me. I didn’t mind beatings. I couldn’t … I’ll never go up again. It’s black up there … it’s so dark you can’t see. Me father said he’d kill me if I didn’t go up. Then …” Her voice broke on a sob.
“I… run away…”
The dark chimneys would always haunt her dreams. When she screamed in the night it was because of those dark chimneys. If only they had known before, perhaps they could have comforted her.
Flash Jane put her face close to the child and said, not unkindly: “What was you took for?”